Indigenous Research in HRD: Perspectives and a Call for Contributions

Taking Stock of the Literature on Indigenous Research in HRD (Yonjoo Cho)

Faced with Western-centered global management research, Tsui (2004), using the term “indigenous” (p. 501), suggested attention to context-specific research that involves a high level of contextualization, or research that derives new theories of the phenomena in specific contexts. Li et al. (2016) defined indigenous research in a broad sense “to encompass the context-sensitive and context-specific approaches to a uniquely local phenomenon, which may have global implications” (p. 584). Given a lack of understanding of the local culture in MNCs in South Korea, Chai et al. (2016) showed Confucian influence on Korean firms’ leadership style and delivered seven overarching indigenous themes (e.g., u-ri) of uniquely Korean managerial behavior, becoming the first known indigenous empirical study on leadership effectiveness in a Korean context.

In HRD, interest in indigenous people and communities has been around but limited. When taking stock of the literature on indigenous research in HRD journals, the word “indigenous” was first found in McLean’s (2006) article in the special issue on worldviews on adult learning in Advances in Developing Human Resources (ADHR): “Increasingly, indigenous people throughout the world are establishing and claiming their right to their own culture and its implications” (p. 419). The special issue covered diverse worldviews: Buddhist, Confucian, Hindu, Islamic, Jewish, Maori, Mormon, Ojibwe American Indian, Russian Orthodox, and Ubuntu. The need for indigenous theory and practice was discussed in McLean’s (2010) article published in a Thai journal based on his several years of societal development projects in non-Western villages and communities.

Apparently, ADHR with themed issues has pioneered as the HRD journal that published special topics on HRD practices in non-Western countries, including societal development through HRD (2012), gender and diversity in India (2016), and the impact of worldviews on women in leadership (2016), though these were not done from the lens of indigenous research. Among the special issue articles, Alagaraja and Wilson (2016) stands out as it explored gender inequity using the narrative ethnography method and addressed the tension between India’s collectivist values that are prejudicial against women and an Indian woman’s personal choice of her divorce and further education in the United States, which might not have been captured well from distant, third-person observations by western HRD scholars.

As an American Indian, Faircloth (2017) reflected on the concept of authentic leadership using life stories and presented her dilemma as an indigenous scholar/administrator with values of an academic institution rooted in Western structures, citing the need for a nuanced conception of authentic leadership that takes into account the complex identities of indigenous people like herself. Turner et al. (2019) developed the Global Leadership Capacity Wheel, a complete model of global leadership through the incorporation of the concept of indigenous leadership that represents the local culture as more localness is called for when developing future leaders.

As diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) from a critical HRD perspective is becoming crucial in HRD research, and there is a strong need to seek for ways to tackle extreme capitalism and unprecedented global crises like Covid-19, alternative ways of knowing and working are taken seriously. The changing landscape of HRD research is asking us to pay attention to indigenous people and communities in line with global and international HRD research. Although indigenous research in HRD has been minimal and conducted under different topics and foci, HRD scholars are on the road to this under-researched area: McLean (2017) continued his international research agenda by emphasizing the importance of culture, indigenous research, and cross-cultural research to move beyond Western-centric HRD research through the development of indigenous instruments and the use of a broad range of methodologies, including action research. Witnessing the current ethnocentric content-related silos in HRD, Cseh and Crocco (2020) suggested developing students with a global mindset in line with sustainability, diversity, and inclusion through an understanding of indigenous approaches to learning and working, including grounded theory approaches and collaboration with scholars from other countries to develop new indigenous HRD theories. To include more culturally responsive methods in HRD research, Grenier et al. (2022) suggested using indigenous methods, such as Talking Circles (Brown & Di Lallo, 2020) that are safe places where relationships are built and Two-Eyed Seeing (Wright et al., 2019) that embraces both Western and indigenous worldviews in indigenous research.

This quick review of the literature on the topic reveals that indigenous research has been around under different titles and topics (e.g., worldviews) as international HRD scholars have always been interested in HRD practices all over the world. ADHR’s special issues in the formative years have been great venues to capture the first-hand experiences of diverse cultures and communities, though these were limited to providing a balance for Western-centric research and practice in HRD. More recent research trends in HRD in terms of emphasizing critical perspectives and DEI have been timely triggers in making indigenous research an alternative to Western-centric knowing and working. This scaled-down review sheds light on the importance of indigenous research in HRD that will open up the possibility of exploring uncharted territory that would highlight “culturally appropriate” (Sambrook and Poell, 2014, p. 476) critical perspectives, promote non-indigenous HRD scholars to collaborate with indigenous people and communities (Ali et al., 2022), use more innovative qualitative research methodologies to capture the uniqueness of indigenous cultures and people, and more importantly, conduct HRD research that arouses strong emotional reactions at the personal level (Whiteman, 2010) that might strengthen our understanding of indigenous phenomena.

Macro Perspectives of Indigenous HRD: The Case of Southeast Asia (Oliver S. Crocco)

Indigenous human resource development (HRD) research and practice are typically considered at the community, organizational, or individual levels given the spectrum of expressions of what could be considered HRD in localities around the world. In Southeast Asia, there are many indigenous groups and ethnic minorities that reflect unique approaches to HRD, which we found, for example, by studying learning and change processes of community-based organizations in Myanmar (Crocco, 2017; Crocco & Cseh, 2021). However, considering the broad definition of indigenous as “occurring natively or naturally in a particular region or environment” (Merriam-Webster, n.d.), there are examples of indigenous HRD happening from macro perspectives as well, i.e., national and regional levels. An illustrative case of such a perspective is the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), an intergovernmental organization with 10-member countries, which has articulated clear HRD policy, as well as mechanisms for HRD implementation in the region (Crocco, 2021; Tkachenko et al., 2022). This HRD policy and practice from a regional perspective emerged not from directly importing dominant practices and discourses from the West, but rather via an iterative process of borrowing, adapting, and reinventing HRD based on the unique cultural, political, and economic context of Southeast Asia (Bartlett et al., 2002; Lao, 2015; Ma Rhea, 2017; Pruetipibultham, 2010).

The process of Southeast Asia reclaiming a form of indigenous HRD in the region comes after reeling from oppressive colonization throughout most of the 20^th century. Motivated to promote regional security, the Southeast Asian countries of Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand formalized their relations by establishing ASEAN in 1967. Membership expanded to Brunei, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, and Vietnam in subsequent decades. ASEAN’s goals also expanded to incorporate socio-cultural and economic issues, which included HRD formally written into the ASEAN Charter of 2008 (Crocco & Tkachenko, 2022). Then, in 2020 ASEAN published its Declaration on Human Resources Development for the Changing World of Work (ASEAN, 2020), as well as its report on Human Resources Development Readiness in ASEAN (ASEAN, 2021), both of which articulated a clear vision for HRD within the region. With buy-in from representatives of all 10 member states, these documents describe overarching regional policy that even delineates conceptually how HRD is different in the region from dominant global discourses such as HRM (Tkachenko et al., 2022). ASEAN’s approach to HRD has been influenced by key leaders in the region like the late Thai King Bhumibol Adulyadej (1927–2016) who introduced the Philosophy of Sufficiency Economy, an approach to development based on principles of moderation, integrity, morality, and sustainability (Pruetipibultham, 2010). ASEAN’s approach to HRD is also informed by cultural values, such as malasakit, the Filipino word for concern or compassion; gotong royong, the Indonesian, Malaysian, and Singaporean concept of mutual cooperation; and kiên cường, the Vietnamese word for resilience (Aubrey, 2020).

Perhaps the most compelling example of indigenous HRD in ASEAN, however, is the emergence of the ASEAN Human Development Organization (ADHO), which has completely dropped the language of humans as “resources” and instead articulates a more holistic conceptualization for developing people in the region (ADHO, n.d.). ADHO facilitates certificates in human development to leaders and people managers in organizations throughout the region who are eager to shift away from Western orientations like the Society for Human Resource Management and more towards a culturally relevant perspective for Southeast Asian citizens. ADHO is even working with Universiti Malaya, a top university in the region, to develop a Master of Human Development degree to further codify this perspective in higher education.

Macro perspectives such as these are worth consideration by HRD scholars because they represent unique, indigenous manifestations of what many would deem HRD but might otherwise go unnoticed if outside mainstream discourses. Given increased autonomy after years of colonial influence, regions like Southeast Asia are shifting back to more indigenous ways of understanding the development of people that are more aligned with their cultural values. Understanding these macro indigenous expressions of HRD will allow scholars and practitioners around the world to have a more understanding of the ways HRD manifests globally. It will allow those of us situated in the dominant discourse of the West to learn from new ways of approaching the study and practice of our field and reckon with the limitations of our understanding.

Reflection on Absences, Symbolic Power, and Symbolic Violence in Knowledge Production (Heeyoung Han)

“Filling the gap” is a common rationale of a research paper, arguing that we are creating a missing piece of knowledge. However, what if we are systematically and chronically creating absences? As part of the structured knowledge production system for a couple of decades as an author, reviewer, and editorial member, I couldn’t help but admit that we have also been creating the absence of others, which has an uncomfortable yet crucial message to the field. Certain topics, methodologies, researchers, and study sites rarely exist in human resource development (HRD) literature. While most studies on HRD practice for larger for-profit companies in the Western and developed countries, we rarely talk about topics, such as oppression and hegemony in the workplace, child labor in some countries, HRD in correctional institutions, public health, global warming and disaster, or global peace (Bierema, 2020; Park, 2021).

When I started my career as a faculty member at a medical school and participated in one of the annual AHRD meetings, some HRD colleagues naively asked how medical education becomes a legitimate topic in HRD. Additionally, we have used a limited set of research methodologies (Park et al., 2022). We rarely see research articles adopting certain methods, such as conversation analysis, years-long longitudinal empirical research, or ethnography, and action research. Our empirical knowledge has grown primarily based on survey or interview data from particular groups of participants (Park et al., 2022). The picture becomes more unsettling if we look closer at who is publishing in major HRD journals. Research collaboration observed in papers published at HRD journals has been centered in the U.S. and Europe, and no partnership has existed among scholars outside the U.S. (Yoon & Chae, 2022). Even when I have seen many non-US authors’ papers in the literature, they, including me, were from doctoral programs in the U.S. Many immigrated to the U.S. This problem seems to be associated with study sites. Certain study sites are absent even when they may have significant needs for human and organizational development. There is a noticeable absence of HRD scholars outside the U.S. and Europe on authorships, editorial boards, and reviewers’ groups. It is unlikely to find a seat in the knowledge production world, i.e., journals, if someone picked non-popular topics, took a less traveled methodological journey, or outside of the U.S. or European affiliation or connections. This is an unwritten rule.

The absence speaks loudly to the HRD field about the existence of others unheard and unexplored, including indigenous knowledge. Knowledge production exists in this delicate social space and is heavily based on the symbolic power (Bourdieu, 1977) of complex relations among journals, academics, authors, reviewers, editors, and readers that legitimatizes what constitutes knowledge and what does not. French sociologist Bourdieu noted that symbolic power is “world-making” power (Bourdieu, 1989, p. 22), which comes from explicit or implicit (often imposed) agreements among players in both dominating and dominated groups regarding what are legitimate topics, authors, reviewers, editors, methodologies, places, and languages. In this way, we have been producing and reproducing the order of knowledge in the field of HRD. A certain group of people makes a more significant symbolic (eventually economic) profit than others with structured access to this symbolic capital (Bourdieu, 1986, 1993).

However, we ought to be aware of the contradictory fact that our knowledge production system as structuring structures, whose function includes generating new forms of knowledge, is also structured themselves by existing structures defining legitimacy, rigor, and prestige set by certain groups, i.e., the U.S. and European value systems. This preset symbolic power by which we have ordered the hierarchy of knowledge in the field inherently entails domination, i.e., symbolic violence (Bourdieu, 1989; Swartz, 1997). Symbolic violence is a mechanism of how we collectively and unconsciously (sometimes consciously) produce absences of others in the field. Imposing the structured value on others, we tend to shape the collective set of knowledge and the knowledge production system in HRD only by reproducing dominant discourses, methodologies, and players. Taking it for granted, we have condoned the absence of others as classifying it as a second class. Given the powerful benefits of symbolic capital that the dominant journals could provide, authors have no choice but to accept the dominants’ agreement and consensus.

I am asking HRD colleagues if we are comfortable with this structuring and structured game in our collective knowledge production. The symbolic power and violence in our knowledge production practice in the field cannot be free from scrutiny as they could guide, constrain, and mislead our collective goal of creating knowledge to advance the field, ultimately improving human and organizational potential for living and working, i.e., humanity. The existence of absences is the symptom of symbolic violence and a loud voice for our symbolic struggles in the field of HRD. The victim of symbolic violence is everyone who seeks knowledge, including the dominants. As a HRDR editorial board member, I believe it is critical to be aware of this hidden and rarely spoken logic of the world-making order in our knowledge production system and take action if we feel uncomfortable with these absences.

Our knowledge production practice in HRD could be constructed in different and plural ways with the meta-level awareness and innovative vision to address the absences and revisit the symbolic violence. These efforts can include various deconstructive iterative actions of restructuring and reconstructing our structuring structures – exploring unexplored topic areas, populations, and sites, forming inclusive reviewer groups, inviting editorial board members worldwide, revisiting research rigor standards and the meaning of research productivity to extend and include different epistemologies and ontologies, facilitating research collaborations beyond the U.S. and European networks, and respecting different meaning-making of different languages. Trusting the power of plurality in social constructions, I would like to note that this authentic struggle over symbolic power structures we have created ought to be a legitimate and continuous topic for dialogues and actions in HRD. This vulnerable reflection on absences and collective actions about the emptiness will let us evolve as a more authentic and reflexive field rather than stagnating and blinded by the partial existence of our community of practice.

Questioning the Meaning behind the English Language Concepts in Indigenous Research (Maria Cseh)

My reflections on indigenous research took shape and evolved over the past 40 years of work informed by what Hall (1996) would call the “the structure of experience as it is molded by culture. That is, those deep, common, unstated experiences which members of a given culture share, communicate without knowing, and which form the backdrop against which all other events are judged” (p. xi). The complexities inherent in meaning making across cultures and languages as captured in Czarniawska & Joerges’ (1996) essay on “travel of ideas,” and in Hofstadter’s (1997) insights on the art of translation to recreate both the message and rhymes of language, show the challenges of interpreting and translating for meaning in understanding the cultural nuances of HRD theories and concepts (Cseh & Short, 2006).

Testing or expending/building HRD theories using quantitative and qualitative research methodologies respectively is the pursuit of all scholars and scholar practitioners in their search for explaining phenomena they observe and experience and, in their search, to solve problems based on evidence. Although Tsui (2004), refers to the need “to derive new theories of the phenomena in their specific context” (p. 501) to ensure high quality indigenous research, and (Wang, 2012) recommend grounded theory building, ethnography, and phenomenological research in HRD indigenous research, after almost two decades there is still a dearth of indigenous HRD research. This phenomenon could be explained by the hegemony of US-based, UK-based, and European-based HRD theories, frameworks, models, and literature (Cseh & Crocco, 2020) in informing the conceptualization of HRD indigenous research conducted by international doctoral students and/or alumni.

In my work in the US with many international doctoral students and alumni, I noticed their desire to “live up to” the highly recognized and citied theories when conducting research in their countries’ context by using the expected traditional research methods to collect data, and by making sense of their findings to fit the theories that informed their studies. In most of the cases, the data is collected in the participants mother tongue, which even if it is English, it is challenging to translate into American English to capture the cultural nuances of the meanings of the studied concepts. Indeed, who can question the importance of family support in women’s entrepreneurial learning or leadership identity development or of psychological safety for employee engagement or for community learning for sustainability as incorporated in US-based theories? But then, what does family support mean in Saudi Arabia or Azerbaijan, or what does psychological safety at work mean in the Sultanate of Oman, or what does sustaining community learning mean in India? What are the cultural meanings behind these concepts as embedded in the experiences of the research participants?

To help HRD students conducting indigenous research to conceptualize their studies and address these questions, we need to dismantle ethnocentric content-related silos by incorporating multiple indigenous perspectives and innovative research methodologies. In addition to the conceptualization of indigenous (using a lowercase “i”) as related to the characteristic phenomena of local contexts and the experiences, knowledge, and practices of people who have historically resided in those contexts, the conceptualization of Indigenous (using an uppercase “I”) and Indigenous epistemology and methodologies (Cajete, 2017; Chilisa, 2012; Nakata, 2002; Pidgeon, 2018; Smith, 2021) should be incorporated in the HRD curriculum. Indigenous people are distinct social or cultural groups “that are inheritors and practitioners of unique cultures and ways of relating to people and the environment” (United Nations, n.d.) whose knowing is holistically tied to being, and interrelationships between all things is at the foundation of making sense and finding meaning.

The concept of “fire” and “cultural burning” in learning sustainable land-management practices as seen by the US Indigenous communities vs. US Western settlers is an exemplary tale of meaning making lost in translation. As Ron Goode, tribal chairman of the North Fork Rancheria of Mono Indians of California, explained “They [Western settlers] came with their concepts of being afraid of fire. They did not understand fire in the sense of the tool that it could be to create and what it did to help generate and rejuvenate the land. So, they brought in suppression” (Sommer, 2020).

The Role of Language in Indigenous Research (K. Peter Kuchinke)

Language is the coin of the realm in HRD; it is at the core of how we capture, present, and convey our knowledge in writing, teaching, and professional practice. More fundamentally, our field has been talked into existence, as Sally Sambrook (2000) observed; it is socially constructed, transmitted, and transformed in speech. Despite its omnipresence, or perhaps because of it, language has received scant attention in HRD. This short editorial piece suggests the central role of language in HRD in general and in indigenous research specifically. More directly, I suggest the need for sensitivity to language in research projects to approach indigenous people’s knowledges and to counter biases of knowledge representation and articulation. These issues are illustrated through insights from a conference session on the experience of HRD scholars born abroad and now living in the US.

Indigenous research is defined here in its original meaning as the search for knowledge on aspects that are native to a given culture, place, or people. Challenges arise in the process of boundary crossing, when outsiders attempt to gain knowledge about indigenous practices. Western and colonial histories are replete with examples of domination and subjugation of minoritized populations (Ali et al., 2022). In these contexts, a classic move by dominant cultures is to deny the use of the native language, one of all too many examples are the practices at Canadian Indian residential schools that operated well into the later part of the 1900s (White & Peters, 2009). I frame the process of approaching indigenous knowledge as a subset of the wider challenge of cross-cultural research with all the thorny dynamics of power, politics, representation, and interests lurking just beneath the surface but often not addressed or even recognized in adequate manner (Ardichvili & Kuchinke, 2002).

Language, as German philosopher, Martin Heidegger (2014, p. 254), wrote in his 1946 Letter on Humanism is the “house of being in which the human being exists.” Today, there are 6909 distinct languages (Linguistic Society of America, 2022), and the question arises: Do we live in the same house of being or are there different language homes? As author Jhumpa Lahiri (2016) wrote, “A new language is almost a new life, grammar and syntax recast you, you slip into another logic and another sensibility” (p. 161). This quote reflects linguistic relativity, a theory developed by Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf (Whorf, 1956) in the early decades of the last century. Accordingly, language is far from a neutral means of expression; rather, language shapes, structures, and controls how we think and perceive ourselves and the world around us. Different languages do so in different ways and are incommensurable, because of the range, depth, and history of words and expressions; a perfect capture of meaning from one language to another is difficult, if not impossible.

To illustrate the effects of linguistic relativity, let me summarize a conference session at the 2020 Academy of Human Resource Development annual meeting in Atlanta (Kuchinke, 2020). A group of about 30 university professors and students met to reflect on our experiences of using US English as a second language in our professional lives. Most of us were born in another country, had moved to the US as young adults, and had made the US our permanent home. At issue was not language proficiency, as most of the group had earned advanced degrees from US universities, many held faculty positions at major research universities, and some were highly placed corporate managers and executives. The focus was on the experience of living in a language world other than the one in which we were born and brought up.

Space does not permit detail on the many, often deeply personal, contributions in our session, but two overarching themes were apparent. The first one is the deep sense of rootedness and connection to the language of birth, even when time in the US long exceeds that in the home country. During introductions, we made the simple request, “tell us where you are from,” and virtually all seminar participants named their birth country, and this despite substantial professional success, good careers, and close family ties in their adopted country. Much of this sense of belonging is mediated through language. Our participants talked about missing the rich language of their home country, and the sense of remaining outsiders on account of their accents. Making small talk, bantering, colloquialisms, metaphors, and similes did not come easily in their adopted language. Many said that their closest friendships were with others from the home country, conversing in their native language, and forming deeper relationships and more meaningful exchanges than with US friends and colleagues. “Some things,” one participant said succinctly, “can only be said in my language.”

A second theme of our session was around a sense of feeling isolated, negated in their “otherness” and pigeon-holed as “not from here” in the context of work and school. This was for many a painful issue, and there was gratitude for the opportunity to give voice to the topic and receiving confirmation of their own experience. The sense was one of not being validated as having a different worldview and understanding and thus forced into a choice between joining a homogenized way of speaking and thinking or remaining isolated and silent. The dominance of a mainstream way of thinking and speaking using U.S. English in faculty meetings, for example, was seen as crowding out, deliberately or otherwise, alternative ways of approaching a topic based on alternative ways of seeing things. As one participant put it: “they assume that, since I speak American, I think like an American.”

Interestingly, our session participants offered very similar assessments whether their country of origin ranked high or low in cultural distance to the US. The tasks of bridging Korean and US English, for example, did not seem any larger in their essential features than between US, British, and even Canadian English. And even within-country linguistic diversity showed similar patterns, and this by region of the country and certainly by racial and ethnic backgrounds.

What, then, do the insights of our session mean for the process of indigenous research in HRD? At a very basic level, I think, it points to the need to be mindful of the deep belonging to the language of origin in cross-cultural encounters; the use of English, and particularly US English, enables connections and exchange, but it can also serve to crowd out and make invisible nuances of expression and ways of thinking of another language world. Deepening on our understanding of the other requires sensitivity to the role of language, the invitation to share how one might speak about a given topic in the other’s language, and paying attention to the role of silences, hesitations, and non-verbal signals. This challenge presents itself even for those with near-perfect mastery of a second language, but equally wherever speakers from dominant language communities interact with second-language speakers. “Language speaks,” to return to a central theme of Heidegger’s ontology of language (in Powell, 2013, p. 9), and the art and craft of indigenous research calls for careful listening and sensitivity to ways of speaking as a “passageway for non-indigenous researchers [to better understand] indigenous worldviews and knowledges” (Ali et al., 2022, p. 197).

Challenges and Opportunities for Indigenous Research in HRD (Gary N. McLean)

Drawing on the previous mini-editorials, my experiences during my global career, and McLean (2010), I suggest what I see as major challenges faced by HRD in furthering indigenous research and address briefly some areas of change needed in policies and practices in response to opportunities that exist to strengthen indigenous HRD research and practice.